A local Manchester entrepreneur who’s made it her business to help local authorities and corporations understand their communities and stakeholders is being honoured, as she hits her second year anniversary, with an award that celebrates her as a key figure at the heart of the research industry.

Dr Felicity Heathcote-Marcz, 34, based in Greater Manchester, makes it her mission to help make public sector spending deliver for residents within local communities, and her work with Sheffield City Council, designing and delivering the research behind a City Centre Access & Movement Strategy, has seen her agency Bare Analysis win the coveted CIHT (the Chartered Institution of Highway and Transportation) Award for best Equality, Diversity and Inclusion project.

Alongside Steer consultancy, a global agency with offices in Manchester, and Nota Bene, an SME based in Sheffield, Bare Analysis took a different approach to providing the insights to inform this Strategy for Sheffield City Council. By focusing on ethnographic techniques alongside focus groups and interviews with business leaders, while reaching out to people who are often excluded from traditional consultation projects, such as refugees, those with disabilities and older and younger demographics, the team made sure an exceptionally rich picture of current transport journeys, needs and priorities for the future was fed back to the client.

This month has also seen her celebrate a new client win, as Bare Analysis taps into innovative methods to help employers in the region. Research has found that the UK economy is significantly affected by long-term sickness absence since the Covid pandemic, and in this health-focused project, Dr Felicity will lead a team focused on understanding the costs to Northern employers of employee sickness absence. They will also look to uncover the impact of chronic pain conditions on the UK workforce. Bare Analysis is working with a team of expert academics and innovators to uncover these costs and provide recommendations for new incentives and treatment options to benefit employees, employers and local government, including the NHS.

Making a name for herself supporting public sector organisations, she’s also worked with West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA), Westminster City Council, Transport for London and Creative Estuary (via RealWorth Consultancy) over the last 2 years – and her expertise was called upon earlier this month when she was a speaker at The Local Transport Summit sharing her insights on ‘Putting people at the heart of transport decisions: Building consensus through user-centred strategy’. She also recently presented on the importance of quality research in a world of AI, as part of a panel discussion at the recent AI summit for the Liverpool City Region.

She said: “Over these last 2 years in self-employment, I have been involved in the delivery of transport projects that have supported strategic decision-making across local government and social value projects. Some of these have put a monetary value on the change to real people’s lives from community interventions. This is what the power of research is all about to me. Uncovering the hidden realities of what change is needed to significantly make a difference to real people, to signpost to clients where change is needed first and most, showcasing the cracks that need fixing via immersive research, to help improve the quality of people’s lives. This helps to make communities stronger – and I’m really grateful that my knowledge and skills enable me to make a difference”.

Dr Felicity founded Bare Analysis in 2023 on an essentialist approach – delivering simple, essential truths which help inform decisions that lead to win-win solutions, both for the user of the services, and from the organisation too. The name ‘Bare Analysis’ was inspired by this essentialist philosophy, along with a trip to the stunning wild Beara Peninsula in Ireland, where the bare beauty of the views sparked reflection on what is essential and important in life.

She has worked with clients across a wide variety of contexts to create positive change, including for local and central government, transport providers, NHS and healthcare companies, banking and ecommerce clients and asset management companies/developers.